PHYS2006: Reading List

Fowles and Cassiday's book is full of examples and is the recommended text, although it stops short of discussing one-dimensional crystal models. The treatment of mechanics in Chow's book parallels the course quite closely and has a modern viewpoint. Kibble, Kibble and Berkshire or Marion and Thornton cover almost everything, but are mathematically more sophisticated. French and Ebison (and French's book on Vibrations and Waves) have good physical explanations but don't cover all the material. Tipler is very gentle and covers most of the course material. Chow's book also covers most of the material and is excellent reading. Acheson's book is recommended for supplementary reading and as general background. It links quite well to some topics in the course. All others are good to integrate material.

D Acheson, From Calculus to Chaos: an Introduction to Dynamics, Oxford University Press 1997
T L Chow, Classical Mechanics, John Wiley 1995
P A Tipler, Physics for Scientists and Engineers (Vol 1, 5th Edition), Freeman 2004
G R Fowles and G I Cassiday, Analytical Mechanics 7th edition, Saunders College Publishing 2004
A P French, Vibrations and Waves, MIT Introductory Physics Series, Van Nostrand Reinhold 1971
A P French and M G Ebison, Introduction to Classical Mechanics, Van Nostrand Reinhold 1986
T W B Kibble, Classical Mechanics 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill 1973
T W B Kibble and F H Berkshire, Classical Mechanics 5th edition, World Scientific Publishing 2004
J B Marion and S T Thornton, Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems 4th edition, Saunders College Publishing 1995

Further, two good foundation books to always have at hand are

K F Riley and M P Hobson, Essential Mathematical Methods for the Physical Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 2011
K F Riley and M P Hobson, Foundation Mathematics for the Physical Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 2011

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Last updated: 1 May 2015